Psychology of News Decisions: Factors behind Journalists’ Professional Behavior

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2004 5: 131JournalismWolfgang Donsbach

BehaviorPsychology of News Decisions: Factors behind Journalists' Professional

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Psychology of news decisionsFactors behind journalists’ professional behavior

j Wolfgang DonsbachDresden University of Technology

A B S T R A C T

This article is about causal explanations for the way journalists report the news. In itsfirst part, the article reviews traditional and current models or theories of journalists’news decisions, concentrating on news factors, institutional objectives, themanipulative power of public relations by news sources and the subjective beliefs ofjournalists. It comes to the conclusion that most of these approaches do not explainthe underlying processes leading to news judgements. Starting from theseshortcomings and from the assumption that most of journalists’ work is aboutperceptions, conclusions and judgements, it then attempts to apply psychologicaltheories to news decision-making. The author holds that two general needs orfunctions involving specific psychological processes can explain news decisions: a needfor social validation of perceptions and a need to preserve one’s existingpredispositions. Empirical data from several surveys and studies among journalists areused to demonstrate the appropriateness of this approach to journalists’ behavior.

K E Y W O R D S j comparative research j news decisions j newsjournalism j professionalization j role perceptions

Introduction: a normative bias in communication research

Theories of news decisions are of central relevance to communication re-

search. They try to explain how non-fictional media content is created and,

thus, how the pictures in our heads about areas beyond direct experience come

about. But journalists’ news decisions are a highly complex phenomenon and

a challenge to communication research. Several authors have proposed models

for the various factors involved in this process (Donsbach, 1987; Kepplinger,

1989; Schudson, 1991; Shoemaker and Reese, 1991; Weischenberg, 1992;

Donsbach and Gattwinkel, 1998). These models, though different in aims and

scope, all have their heuristic merits. However, we still await an empirical

Journalism

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theory which is able to integrate all these factors – and probably such a theoryis not possible theoretically due to the complexity of the process. Instead, wehave developed theories which try to assess the influence of individual factorsin the news flow, the most important ones in this context being the theory ofnews values (Schulz, 1976; Staab, 1990; Kepplinger and Rouwen, 2000), thetheory of instrumental actualization (Kepplinger et al., 1991), theories ofsocial interaction (Tuchman, 1978; Gans, 1979), the theory of deviance andsignificance (Shoemaker, 1996), system theories (Ruhl, 1969; Meckel, 1999) orthe hypothesis theory of news research (Stocking and LaMarca, 1990).

However, contrary to their application in reception and effects analysis,when it comes to explaining journalists’ news decisions, cognitive-psychological and sociopsychological approaches have so far received littleattention by the scientific community. Although psychological factors areoften explicitly and, very much more so, implicitly built into these ap-proaches, they do not have the status of causal explanations. This is even moreastonishing as one of the earliest communication models by Westley andMcLean (1957) focused on cognitive-psychological factors in the communica-tion process and could have served as a heuristic model in research on newsdecisions.

This shortcoming might be due to a ‘normative bias’ in our research.Scholars in modern democracies usually complain about the quality of news,particularly political news. We find personalization where we expect issues,political issues where we want policy issues, negativism and scandalizationwhere we want a fair description of people and institutions, bias instead ofobjectivity, to name a few of the complaints. As media critics, we do what allcritics do: we compare what we find in the news media with what we thinkwould be best for an informed citizen and, thus, for democracy as a whole.

We apply the same comparison to citizens’ exposure to and processing ofthe news. Our studies find that their interest in news media and news is lowerthan it ought to be and that it is shrinking, particularly among the young. Ifpeople read and watch, they do not read and watch what we think theyshould. Even more pessimistic are our findings about the reception of politicalinformation. It is usually processed in a ‘peripheral’ rather than a ‘central’ waywhere the TV anchor’s clothes become more important than the parliamentarydecisions that he or she discusses. Most of the news never enters long-termmemory and, if it does, the existing schemata will have distorted it. For allthese assessments, we have sufficient proof from empirical research.

However, the underlying assumption or paradigm in this type of researchis probably a distorted picture of the function of mass communication, ingeneral, and the news process, in particular. This is not a new argument.Walter Lippmann (1922) was among the first to point to the fact that the

132 Journalism 5(2)



media are overcharged with the task of presenting a true picture of the ‘worldoutside’. Thomas Patterson (1993) talks of the ‘miscast institution’, pointing tothe fact that the rationale of the media is business and, therefore, news valuesand not organizing the political process. But the influence of existing newsvalues is only one factor. We must pull more elements together if we want tounderstand the process of news from its production to its reception.

It is possible that most factors in this process can probably be betterexplained if we look at the cognitive and emotional needs of the actorsinvolved. However, many social scientists seem to have some problems withpsychology and its nomological character: psychology strives for the ‘laws’behind human behavior and, thus, focuses more on commonalities betweenindividuals rather than on the diversity between them. This suspicion is againno new problem. It accompanied the introduction of empirical social researchand particularly the application of statistical methods to humans. Social ‘laws’were misunderstood as limiting the freedom of the individual as positive legallaw does. Indeed, in many areas research has found similar behavior, e.g. inphysical or cognitive reactions to specific media stimuli (known as thestimulus-response or ‘hypodermic needle’ paradigm), in coping with specificsocial situations or messages, etc. No other discipline has produced so muchsolid and repeatedly verified knowledge about our species as behavioralpsychology. 1 However, similarities in and patterns of behavior must not bemisunderstood as limitations to human behavior in a normative sense.

It might be for this natural tendency of the nomological sciences towardscommonalities that the adoption of this knowledge by scholars of commu-nication and particularly political communication is rather rare. Their own‘normative bias’ is oriented towards the model of a rational, constantlyinformation-seeking individual mainly guided by his/her own predispositionsand interests. In short, this picture of social actors assumes diversity instead ofsimilarity. This is also the reason why – overlooking the history of communica-tion exposure and effects research – theories and results about an individualis-tic, effects-resistant, rational and selective recipient have always found moresupporters inside and outside the scientific community than theories andfindings of a passive audience and powerful media (Biocca, 1988).

This article is an attempt to make use of the evidence in psychology,particularly social and cognitive psychology, in order to improve our under-standing of the news process. However, I am far from advocating a psycho-logical monopoly. As in most cases, there are several ways to the truth and it isthe combination or integration of different approaches and different dis-ciplines that can improve our knowledge. Instead, this article describes thebasic processes that might influence the way journalists look at and make theirselection from what is going on in the real world. 2 For reasons of space, it does

Donsbach Psychology of news decisions 133



not look at the recipients’ side where psychological factors are as importantbut have been dealt with much more intensively in the past.

Traditional explanations of news decisions

News decisions are complex and ephemeral situations. Several attempts havebeen made to put some order into the flood of variables involved in thisprocess (see, for example, Donsbach, 1987; Kepplinger, 1989; Schudson, 1989;Stocking and Gross, 1989). It is no surprise that none of these models has beenable to reflect the complexity involved in this process because the selection ofvariables already depends very heavily on the purpose or heuristic functionof the model at hand. Nevertheless, most communication scholars wouldagree that research so far has led to four main factors that seem to influence ajournalist’s decision whether to print or dump a story and how to present it:news factors, institutional objectives, the manipulative power of news sourcesand the subjective beliefs of journalists.

Since Lippmann (1922) first introduced the concept of news factors, theyhave been regarded as professional assessments of the characteristics thatmake a story worth reporting. Empirical research has found, for instance,that events and stories containing personalization, negativism or factualityhave a greater chance of being selected by journalists than those which do not(Schulz, 1976; Kepplinger and Rouwen, 2000). News factors also explain aconsiderable amount of variance in the news selection by the audience (Eildersand Wirth, 1999; Patterson, 2000). The thrust of these news factors is ratherinvariant and only subject to long-term changes such as changing ‘newsideologies’ as described, among others, by Westerstahl and Johansson (1989)or Zhu (1990).

Institutional objectives, in contrast, are those expectations a journalist facesas a consequence of his or her employment status. These objectives can relateto form and content. The growing ‘tabloidization’ of newspapers and theincrease in soft news items on television are often cited as consequences ofsuch objectives (Kalb, 1998; Esser, 1999). In these cases, we assume a pressureon the reporter or the editor to highlight specific topics (like crime) and useattractive formats (like pictures or human reactions) in order to increase theaudience’s attention. Institutional objectives can also imply pressures to pro-duce a certain slant, for instance when a publisher pursues specific ideologicalor political goals with the news medium he or she owns.

The increasing role of public relations in many parts of society includingpolitics has led to hypotheses about the strong impact that these sources mighthave on journalists’ news decisions (‘determination hypothesis’). One of the

134 Journalism 5(2)



arguments holds that journalists are flooded with public relations material so

that the time needed for its selection and processing consumes the time for

research, and critical proof, of facts. In another approach, communication

consultants and spin-doctors are perceived as armed with scientific knowledge

about the way the press and journalists function so that they can easily

manipulate their actions through ‘strategic communication’ (see, for instance,

Manheim, 1991, 1997).

Finally, the influence of journalists’ subjective beliefs in news decisions has

often been a point of argument between members of the profession, on the

one hand, and communication researchers or media critics, on the other.

Nevertheless, there is sufficient evidence that a journalist’s predispositions

towards an issue or an actor can affect his or her news decisions (Starck and

Soloski, 1977; Kepplinger et al., 1991), though the degree of this influence

might differ between journalists from different countries, within different

news organizations and with different professional values (Patterson and

Donsbach, 1996).

Weaknesses of traditional explanations

But what are the variables behind the variables? It is one of the problems of

these explanations that they rest on different analytical and theoretical levels

and that their explicit or implicit assumptions about causalities dig varyingly

deep into the news process. As a consequence, it is hard, if not impossible, to

relate them to each other empirically and to assess the relative variance in

news decisions which each of them can explain. Within the theory of news

values, the selection (or, better, editorial emphasis) of a news story is explained

by the existence and prominence of certain features of the news (like nega-

tivism, personalization, etc.). However, this is not an explanatory concept as it

only describes the structure of media reality. It does not answer the question

why specific factors are more powerful than others. 3

Institutional objectives, the second of the factors mentioned earlier, are

not a distinct variable at all. Researchers who have worked in this field rarely

specify what factors could really have influenced news decisions. Warren

Breed’s (1955; see also Reese and Ballinger, 2001) early works about social

control in the newsroom or Gans’ (1979) and Tuchman’s (1978) participant

observations belong to these exceptions. But they, too, describe social settings

rather than processes and, therefore, lack explanatory power. When it comes

to really explaining individual news decisions, they depend more or less on

guesses.




The same is true for the impact of public relations. Studies in this fieldusually count the proportion of news items originating from press releases,press conferences or individual contacts between sources and reporters. Theprocesses behind such relationships are, however, rarely investigated. As aconsequence, it remains unclear what factors in the news process have finallybrought about a certain ‘impact’. Is it time pressure? Is it by tricking journaliststhrough intimate knowledge of their behavioral patterns? Is it the anticipationof benefits by corrupt journalists?

Only studies which have investigated the impact of subjective beliefs onnews decisions follow a more straightforward and conclusive causal model.They relate either a journalist’s prior knowledge of or attitude towards an issueor a public figure or his or her general ideological beliefs to news decisions. Buteven in this research field most studies have presented their evidence in termsof correlations and cannot assess how predispositions affect the perception ofan event and how it is covered.

It is self-evident, however, that regressing one dependent variable likenews decisions on one or two independents is not necessarily followed byregressions of the latter on other independent variables preceding these. Thiswould lead to an infinite regression and be counterproductive for the detec-tion of relationships in the real world. 4 However, in journalism research wehave not yet arrived at the point where the inclusion of further variablesbecomes redundant or counterproductive. Instead, we treat the process ofnews in many aspects without really unveiling the underlying processes.

Most of journalists’ work is about perceptions, conclusions and judge-ments: to see reality; to infer from it to developments and relationships; and toevaluate reality. It is my main hypothesis that two general needs or ‘functions’involving specific psychological processes can explain news decisions: a needfor social validation of perceptions and a need to preserve one’s existingpredispositions. The former rests more in the social nature of men, the latterrelates primarily to their individual cognitions. Of course, both factors areintertwined. But for analytical reasons, I will treat them separately. Most if notall other factors discussed earlier, and many others that have been proposed asinfluencing the news process, can be regarded as an offspring of these two.

Social validation of judgements: the function of shared reality

‘The facts are not simple, and not at all obvious, but subject to choice andopinion’ (Lippmann, 1922: 218). This characteristic of news makes journalisma risky business. Journalists have to decide what is true, what is relevant andwhat is, in a moral sense, good or bad. In other words, they must constantly

136 Journalism 5(2)



make factual and evaluative decisions. As this is a feature of many professions,

journalists face four additional problems. They have to make these decisions

usually under severe time constraints and under the pressure of competition.

For many news decisions they lack objective criteria and their decision

becomes immediately public, i.e. visible to many others, which carries the

risk of public failure. Figure 1 summarizes this dilemma of the journalistic

profession.

The lack of objective criteria does not, however, apply to all kinds and

objects of reporting. Decisions of truth can often be verified objectively

and good and professional news-reporting can be distinguished from a poor

reporting by the extent to which available sources and data have been

exploited. This is a question of research activity, of professional knowledge

about sources and the readiness to ‘falsify’ one’s own assumptions and hypo-

theses (Stocking and LaMarca, 1990). For instance, in many cases reporters can

prove the truth of a spokesperson’s assertions by asking the right experts or

digging into the relevant databanks, thus building their final decision about

the legitimacy of a particular assertion on an objective basis.

But often such criteria for evaluation do not exist or cannot be supplied

under the typical constraints of the business. Claims made by scientists that,

for instance, BSE can be transferred to humans or forecasts by an economist of

how the economy will develop in the next 12 months can hardly be verified by

a journalist him- or herself even if he or she has been trained in these fields.

Other than factual decisions, evaluative judgements such as the news

value of an event or the moral acceptability of a political actor’s behavior lack,

by definition, such objective criteria. They are always based on value judge-

ments which can neither be verified nor falsified (Popper, 1977; Albert, 1980).

Figure 1 Journalists’ dilemma in news decisions




Walter Lippmann described this dilemma when he compared journalism withother professions: ‘There is no discipline in applied psychology, as there is adiscipline in medicine, engineering, or even law, which has authority to directthe journalist’s mind when he passes from the news to the vague realm oftruth. . .. His version of truth is always his version’ (Lippmann, 1922: 227).Thus, journalists often find themselves in what psychologists call uncertain orundetermined situations.

How do humans cope with such situations? Social psychologists have longdescribed the function of groups in solving such uncertain or indefinitesituations (for instance, Hofstatter, 1971). For instance, Sherif had groups ofsubjects look at a point of light projected onto a wall in a dark room. Subjectswere asked to decide whether the point was still or moving. This situationindeed lacks objective criteria for decision-making because the physically fixed-light point will, for each subject, subjectively ‘move’ slightly from time to timedue to the characteristics of our visual perception apparatus (an autokineticpoint). Although it was logically impossible for the group to decide objectively,most groups finally came up with a unanimous decision (Sherif, 1966).

In his ‘social comparison theory’, Leon Festinger (1954) also suggestedthat an opinion, a belief or an attitude is ‘correct’, ‘valid’ and ‘proper’ only tothe extent to which it is anchored in a group of people with similar beliefs,opinions and attitudes. He then describes three conditions under whichpeople are most dependent on others: when external reality is ambiguous anddifficult to assess, when there is a dualism between physical and social realityand when physical reality takes precedence over social reality.

Hardin and Higgins (1996) have extended this hypothesis to all kinds ofperceptions of reality. In their ‘shared reality’ theory, they combine the theoryof symbolic interaction with empirical evidence on the communication proc-ess. They assume that even basic cognitive processes are defined by the socialactivities in which they are manifested.

In particular we suggest that in the absence of social verification, experience istransitory, random, and ephemeral, like the flicker of a firefly. But once recog-nized by others and shared in an ongoing, dynamic process of social verificationwe term ‘shared reality’, experience is no longer subjective; instead it achievesthe phenomenological status of objective reality. That is, experience is estab-lished as valid and reliable to the extent that that it is shared with others. (Hardinand Higgins, 1996: 28)

In other words: sharing one’s experience and beliefs with others makes themintersubjective, i.e. reliable, valid, generalizable and predictable, a metaphorfrom the philosophy of science that the authors use explicitly (p. 35f). Suchshared reality is reliable because it is reproduced by others, it is valid becauseit refers to a certain aspect of reality, and it is generalizable because it is valid

138 Journalism 5(2)



for several individuals, times and situations. It is also able to make predictionsbecause it helps to control one’s own behavior in the environment. Althoughshared reality might not necessarily yield the ‘truth’ in every instance, it is thebest the individual can get in order to validate his/her own perception ofreality. The channel for achieving shared reality is communication: ‘a hold onreality requires cooperative social activity; in particular, consensually validatedsocial roles and relationships are required for the mutual creation, monitoring,and maintenance of the individual experience of reality’ (p. 38). Once a sharedreality is established, it can survive even under the conditions of competingshared realities. It has crucial functions in the building and maintaining ofstereotypes and for the socialization of individuals (see Hardin and Higgins,1996: 64).

It is obvious that journalists are constantly in undetermined, uncertainsituations. To report from a news conference what nobody else has reported ornot to report what everybody else reports can be embarrassing and jeopardizea reporter’s professional standing. Without a theoretical background in socio-psychological concepts, Timothy Crouse, in his book on reporters in the1968 presidential campaign, has very realistically described this situation ofanxieties on the journalists’ side:

But while these papers want to have a guy there getting all the inside stuff, theydon’t want reporters who are ballsy enough and different enough to make anykind of trouble. It would worry the sh . . . out of them if their Washingtonreporter happened to come up with a page-one story that was different from whatthe other guys were getting. And the first . . . thing that happens is they pick upthe phone and call this guy and say, ‘Hey, if this is such a hot story, how come APor the Washington Post doesn’t have it?’ And the reporter’s in big . . . trouble. Theeditors don’t want scoops. Their abiding interest is making sure that nobody elsehas got anything that they don’t have, not getting something that nobodyelse has. (Crouse, 1972: 9f.)

Of course, the editors’ desire not to be the only news outlet with a story thatnobody else prints or broadcasts and vice versa is also sponsored by theprofessional norm to confirm and double-check the news and by the influenceof competition. But it is the reporters on the ‘reality front’, in particular, whoare much more guided by the need to make, under severe constraints, apseudo-objective decision on what is newsworthy – and who, therefore, seekthe ‘shared reality’ with others.

Ways of group orientation

I believe that this general theory about reality perception can help us tounderstand decision-making processes in the journalistic profession. The riskysituation of making decisions that become public requires that the perception




of what is true (facts), relevant (agenda) and acceptable (opinions) is validated

by the help of others. But who are these others? Of course, journalists interact

with many groups as part of the profession as well as in the private sphere. But

if it really comes to decision-making there is, for two reasons, only one group

that counts: other journalists. First, they are the easiest to access. Second, they

are their peers and, as such, represent professional norms. Therefore, they are,

from the journalist’s point of view, perceived as the most legitimate influence

on his or her decision-making.

There are many ways in which journalists can communicate with their

peers in order to assess a shared reality. First, there is social interaction on the

job. Usually several journalists cover the same event. Crouse (1972) has

described how the ‘boys on the bus’ on the 1972 campaign trail interact and

observe each other before they make a decision as to what aspects over a

primary campaign event they would report to their editors. Tuchman (1978)

and Gans (1979) have reported insights into newsroom social interaction. The

importance of colleagues is also supported by data from comparative cross-

national surveys among news journalists in five countries. Between 65 (USA)

and 84 percent (Sweden) of the news journalists stated that ‘other journalists

in my newsroom’ are very or quite important as ‘sources of guidance’ when

deciding what to cover and how. 5 Second, journalists observe what other news

media report and how they report their stories. Wire services and leading

national media play an important role in deciding the media’s shared reality:

in the USA, 64 percent, and in Germany, as many as 90 percent of the news

journalists mention news agencies as sources of orientation, between 50 and

64 percent ‘leading national media’ (Figure 2). This confirms Breed’s (1965)

evidence on the role of ‘opinion leaders’ in the press. In Germany, the

magazine Der Spiegel primarily plays this role. For instance, its trends in

covering former chancellor Helmut Kohl over a period of 10 years predicted

the subsequent coverage of most of the nationwide German print media

(Kepplinger et al., 1989).

Third, even social interaction with their fellows away from the job is a way

journalists can assess shared reality. In the USA, three out of four and, in

Germany, two out of three news journalists stated that at least ‘one of their

three best friends’ is also a journalist. Thus, the process of setting a group

opinion is not restricted to newsrooms or press conferences (Figure 3). More

research on the social networks of journalists is needed to underpin these

observations. An interesting historical episode is Susan Herbst’s survey of US

journalists who worked in the 1930s and 1940s. Asked how they assessed

public opinion in times before survey research became common, eight out of

ten said through discussions with their own colleagues (Herbst, 1990).

140 Journalism 5(2)



Media consonance as an indicator of shared reality

Communication research has long dealt with the ‘consonance’ in mediacoverage. One of the most illuminating examples from research has been thecoverage of an anti-Vietnam war demonstration in the city of London beforeand after the event. Halloran et al. (1970) described how the media built up a

Source: Patterson and Donsbach, 1996.

Figure 2 Guidance in news decisions. Question: ‘Each day, journalists must make difficultdecisions about what news to cover and what to highlight. When making these decisions,how important to you are the following sources of guidance?’

News journalists, 1991–2Source: Patterson and Donsbach, 1996.

Figure 3 In-group orientation of journalists. Question: ‘How many of your three bestfriends are journalists?’




common expectation towards the event (the likeliness of violent acts and aleading role of foreign demonstrators). Although the event itself turned out tobe very different from these expectations, the coverage still concentrated onthe few minor happenings during the demonstration that seemed to confirmthem. Thus, the coverage stayed within the ‘frame of reference’ built up beforethe event. The authors explain their results mainly through the media’s biastowards the activist groups. However, another explanation isthe strength of the commonly shared reality of what is newsworthy.

So-called ‘key events’ are another illuminating example of how strong theassessment of such a shared reality can influence news decisions. After eventswith a high visibility, such as disasters, reports about similar events increasesignificantly compared to the previous coverage of the same type of events. Forinstance, before a major tank-truck collision German news media reported 82similar events, in the period after the key event they reported 279 suchaccidents not including the coverage of the key event itself. Real world eventscould not have been the reason for this increase because the number of suchtraffic accidents had, in fact, decreased (Kepplinger and Habermeier, 1995).Further evidence on the role of key events has been presented by Brosius andWeimann (1991) for the coverage of terrorism, Brosius and Eps (1993) for newsabout attacks against foreigners and Kepplinger (2001) for joint scandalizationby the media. Although we lack a conclusive causal explanation, it seemsplausible that such patterns of reporting can, at least to a certain extent, beexplained by journalists’ need to validate their professional decisions aboutwhat is newsworthy: because similar events have been covered before, some-thing that fits the pattern will be covered with higher priority at a laterstage.

In a longitudinal perspective, these commonly shared perspectives canchange news values for good. The increasing proportion of negative news is anindicator for these long-term shared realities. This is what Westerstahl andJohansson (1986) have labeled changes in news ideologies. News ideologies arenews factors at a higher level. They are not only criteria for deciding about thenewsworthiness of an event or statement but reflect how journalists see theirgeneral role in society and towards the political system.

The concept of ‘news frames’ can also be regarded as another by-productof journalists’ shared reality. Kerbel and Ross (1999) see frames as the con-sequence of commonly shared scripts which journalists develop. Scripts em-body the journalist’s working assumptions through which they understandthe political world. Whereas frames are the tangible product of journalists,scripts are the internalized, often implicit, understanding news-workers use tointerpret the world (Kerbel and Ross, 1999: 3). In politics these scripts oftenrelate to the motives and goals of political figures. In their analysis of US

142 Journalism 5(2)



campaign coverage from 1984 to 1996, Kerbel and Ross found that media

content very often impugned the motivation of the candidates. Ehmig (1991)

found similar results for the portrayal of politicians by the German news

magazine Der Spiegel.

Bennett holds that a ‘small set of rules accounts for a large share of

political content in the news . . . and gathering, sorting, shading, and

packaging the day’s political information reflect the application of creative

decision rules based on, or rationalized by, these norms’ (Bennett, 1996: 378).

In the light of shared-reality theory, such ‘rules’ are nothing other than

condensations and generalizations from journalists’ prevailing perception of

reality. According to Kepplinger, in processes of scandalization, journalists are

often subject to two errors. First, they falsely believe that they have achieved

their judgements independently. Second, they falsely believe that the con-

vergence of the judgements among the group of colleagues over time is a proof

for the validity of these judgements (Kepplinger, 2001). The Sherif experiment

mentioned earlier is a typical situation for news journalists: making decisions

in undetermined situations. The decision about reality, therefore, represents

group dynamics and group norms rather than reality. As journalists have

similar values and attitudes, more than members of most other professions, it

is rather easy for them to develop a shared reality. To play it safe by sticking

with the pack, as Crouse described the campaign reporters’ patterns of be-

havior (Crouse, 1972: 15), is part of media power.

Organizational influences and PR as processes of social validation

Although they are the most important, colleagues are not the only reference

group for journalists. I argue that we can also conceptualize the influence of

organizational roles and of public relations as part of this sociopsychological

process of defining the news in undetermined situations. These roles con-

tribute – with their own goals and with different degrees of influence – to the

journalists’ judgements.

In democratic societies, journalism is an independent profession where

the professionals – at least in a physical or legal sense – cannot be forced to

make decisions against their own judgements. Nevertheless, pressure from

seniors, management and owners to make specific news decisions does exist.

Its impact is, however, more a psychological one. Cases where journalists

consciously make news decisions against their better knowledge are the

exception rather than the rule. In most cases their professional decisions are

made deliberately. The influence of organizational roles rather consists of




persuasive processes than forced compliance. This does not mean that there are

no real threats. Not reacting to these influences might still jeopardize a

journalist’s economic and professional situation.

In many countries, experts complain about an increasing commercial

influence on news decisions. Indeed, we observe more soft news and more

tabloid news formats catering for anticipated audience taste (Kalb, 1998; Esser,

1999). As this new news (Kalb) is very likely not a product of the professional

orientation and ethics of journalists themselves, it is probably a consequence

of subtle influence from seniors, managers and proprietors. However, we

obviously do not realize this influence.

In a cross-national survey of news journalists, not more than 10 percent of

the respondents in all five countries stated that ‘pressure from senior editors’

or from ‘management’ are ‘very important’ as limitations to their professional

work. Even if one includes those who say that such limitations are ‘quite

important’, the percentage in most countries does not exceed 20 percent. 6 In a

more specific question, we asked reporters and editors how frequently news

that they had prepared had been changed by seniors in the newsroom. Only

6 percent of the US respondents reported that this happened often ‘in order to

increase audience interest’, marking the highest frequency for all five coun-

tries. Editorial revisions for the reason to give the story ‘a political slant’ are

even more rare: 1 percent of the US journalists and 2 percent of their Italian

counterparts report such influences (Figure 4).


Figure 4 Editorial control in the newsroom. Question: ‘How often is the news you preparechanged by another person in the newsroom?’

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One can conclude from these results that, if influences through institu-tional objectives exist, they make their way in a subtle manner into ajournalist’s self-perception as a subjectively independent decision-maker. Inother words, they become part of the reality definition through communica-tion. This kind of communication does not necessarily happen over each andevery news decision. It can be a long-term process, which we then would call‘socialization’ in the newsroom.

The influence of sources and their public-relations strategies is anotherfactor that I suggest should be regarded from this sociopsychological per-spective. The definition of what is important, e.g. in a political leader’s majorspeech, is the result of communication not only among reporters but alsobetween reporters, on the one side, and PR officers or spin-doctors, on theother. Here, again, Walter Lippmann clearly described this process when hepointed to the beneficial effect of ‘the publicity man’ who ‘saves the reportermuch trouble by presenting him a clear picture of a situation out of which hemight otherwise make neither head nor tail’ (Lippmann, 1922: 218).

Measures of the real influence of public relations on news decisions varyin methods and results. Results also differ quite considerably when journaliststhemselves attribute the influence of public officials on their news decisions.When asked to what extent the news agenda of their news organization isdetermined by journalists or by public officials, 7 a clear majority of Swedishand British journalists believes that this power is on their side. In the USA, stilla relative majority of 49 percent of the respondents believes that it is theythemselves who set the agenda, while one in three respondents thinks that itis public officials. In Germany and even more so in Italy, a slight majorityholds that public officials determine the news agenda (Figure 5). Although therespective questions are not really comparative, the results suggest that jour-nalists perceive the influence of PR sources to be bigger than the influence ofmanagement.

Of course, a third group that influences news decisions is the audience.Some of this influence is picked up by the institutional objectives to cater foraudience taste as described earlier. But journalists have their own conceptionsof the audience and its taste. Although direct interaction with audiencemembers is scarce, feed-back through letters to the editor, call-ins or data frommarket research lead to a more or less coherent picture of the average audiencemember. Some scholars have described journalists’ news decisions as the resultof a symbolic interaction with this picture of the audience (Früeh and Schöen-bach, 1982). This, too, would be a communication process leading to a specificdefinition of reality and of the newsworthy. However, the majority of journal-ists do not believe subjectively that the expectations of their audience threatentheir professional performance. Only between 9 (German) and 25 percent




(British) of the news journalists in our cross-national survey see ‘the necessity

for capturing the audience’s attention’ as a very important limitation on their

work. This confirms earlier results obtained with a different methodology by

Flegel and Chaffee (1971).

There is no doubt that the hypothesis about the influence of journalists’

sociopsychological needs to assess professional judgements in undetermined

situations needs further empirical evidence. What I have presented so far are

more scattered bits and pieces of evidence usually gathered for different

purposes. Future research for assessing this influence could go two ways: rigid

experimental studies on the social perception and group decision-making of

journalists could be undertaken or more participant observations of journal-

ists’ behavior in and outside the newsrooms.

The power of predispositions: selectivity in the process ofperception

The second major psychological factor which influences journalists’ percep-

tions and, thus, their news decisions is the journalist’s existing knowledge and

attitudes. These predispositions come into play in three different phases of

journalistic work: in the exposure to statements and events in their environ-


Figure 5 Who determines the agenda of news reporting? Question: ‘As regards your ownnews organization, to what extent do you think the news agenda is determined byjournalists or by public officials?’

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ment, the processing of such information in the cognitive system and theiractivation in reproduction. Here is not the place to go into details of thepsychology of perceptions. However, a few aspects must be mentioned.

Perception is a process of gaining information from the environment aswell as from inside the cognitive and physical system, including emotionalprocesses involved in these activities. The result of perceptional processes isalways a co-product of stimuli, mainly in the environment, and prior experi-ences stored in long-term memory. In other words, different individuals canperceive the same object differently (Frohlich, 1991; Flade, 1994). Thus, amajor characteristic of the perceptional process is its high degree of selectivity.Selectivity happens on different levels which can be distinguished into se-lective attention, selective perception and selective retention. In the process ofselective attention, individuals decide to which of the innumerable stimuli inthe outside world they address their perceptional system. A high degree ofselectivity is necessary (‘automaticity’, see Donohew et al., 1984) in order toact in the environment, for instance, in selecting the relevant visual andauditory signals out of millions of other signals when driving a car. Here, too,the characteristics of the stimuli (e.g. colors, noises) and the characteristics ofthe individual (e.g. prior experience) come into play.

In the second phase, selective perception, we decide how we will process andstore the information which we have adapted to our cognitive system. In the‘hypothesis theory’ of perception, it is assumed that each perception startswith a hypothesis by the individual. This hypothesis is based on prior percep-tions and includes assumptions about the probability of certain signals andinformation. The strength of this hypothesis is itself based on prior verifica-tions, the number and strength of alternative hypotheses and the motivationalsupport for the respective hypothesis (Bruner and Postman, 1949; Hoffmann,1994).

Hypothesis theory is closely linked to schema theory (Axelrod, 1973;Brosius, 1991). Schemata can be regarded as ‘drawers’ into which new informa-tion is stored. Information for which we lack schemata cannot be processedand stored the way they are but have to be adjusted. Information supportingexisting predispositions receive higher salience than non-supportive informa-tion. Doris Graber has described, for instance, how schemata influence theway citizens perceive political information in a campaign (Graber, 1984).The ‘hostile media phenomenon’ can be regarded as another indirect proof ofthe existence of such schemata. Audience members with strong attitudesusually perceive neutral reports as biased against their own viewpoint (Valloneet al., 1985; Perloff, 1989). The greater the existing knowledge and the strongerthe attitudes towards an issue were, the more selectively viewers perceived anews report. Finally, in the process of selective retention, our cognitive system




makes decisions to which of the prior stored information it will keep thememory path alive. As we all know, this is again a highly selective process. Itis again strongly influenced by predispositions, attitudes and motivations.

It becomes clear that the existence and characteristics of prior cognitionsstrongly influence to which signals in our environment we address ourattention, which of those we process further, how we process them and whathappens to them in memory. Integrating into this simple model of perceptionthe previously mentioned socio-psychological theory of shared reality leads toa three-component model of perception: characteristics of the object, predis-positions of the individual and communication with others.

Journalists’ perceptions

In communication research the application of psychological evidence onperceptions has been restricted mainly to the recipients’ behavior. This isparticularly true for research on selective exposure to mass communicationwhich has been primarily based on theories of consistency (see Zillmann andBryant, 1985; Donsbach, 1991). Their common denominator is the assump-tion that the individual tends to hold consistent cognitions and, thus, ishighly selective in his or her exposure to news content. If dissonance stillarises, the individual will try to reduce it by avoiding situations and informa-tion which is likely to increase dissonance or by actively seeking consonantinformation. According to more recent evidence, the effect of the consistencymotivation has been over-rated. Editorial emphasis on news and its valence(negativity) can over-ride the ‘protective shield’ of selective exposure (Dons-bach, 1991). For the audience a strong selectivity would also be dysfunctional.An individual’s exposure to news is mainly guided by the motivation to surveythe environment and it would be counterproductive to blend out large partsof the news only because it does not fit the predispositions.

However, journalists are in a slightly different position from their audi-ence. Their reservoir of potential news is almost unlimited and their need to beselective, therefore, is much greater than the audience’s. On average, news-paper readers read about half of the news items in a daily newspaper, at leasttheir headlines. Their selectivity rate is accordingly roughly one in two.Journalists, in contrast, have to drop at least about nine in ten news items fromthe news supplied only by the wire services. In addition, they have to makechoices from what their correspondents supply, from other news sources suchas press releases and spokespersons, and from their own, almost unlimitedpossibilities to do their own research on any topic. Although journalists’decisions are guided and, thus, de facto limited by professional conventions ofwhat is newsworthy, it becomes clear that the likelihood of their decisions

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being influenced by their own predispositions is bigger just from the statistics.This applies, for instance, to the topics chosen, their selective attention toaspects of a political speech or text, the observation of non-verbal behavior ina televised debate or the spontaneous judgement of the newsworthiness of anincoming story.

In his theory of instrumental actualization, Kepplinger has empiricallyinvestigated how journalists’ predispositions affect their judgement on thenewsworthiness of a controversial story (see Kepplinger et al., 1991). In hisquasi-experimental study, news items supporting the journalist’s own opinionon the issue at hand were attributed a higher news value than those which rancounter to these opinions. About one-third in the variance of news decisionscould be explained by this ‘instrumentality’ to the journalist’s predispositions.In another German study, Rosenthal (1987) has shown similarly that thereadiness of the journalists in his survey sample to publish negative rumorsabout a politician varied significantly with their attitude towards this figure.Those who disliked him were far more ready to publish without double-checkson accuracy than those in favor. Obviously, the application of major pro-fessional norms (double-checking, on the one hand, and timeliness, on theother) depends to a great degree on journalists’ predispositions towardsthe news issue at hand.

Several other studies have proven, at least for Germany, that the news isoften selected according to whether it matches the editorial slant of a newsorganization as measured in the editorials (‘synchronization’ of news witheditorials [Schonbach, 1977; Donsbach, 1997]). This also applies to the cita-tion of sources such as experts and spokespersons (Hagen, 1992). Mann (1974)found similar results for newspapers in the USA when they reported the figuresof how many people participated in rallies on controversial issues.

In journalism the process of selective perception can hardly be separatedfrom selective attention as described previously. When journalists attribute acertain news value to a news item, this can be regarded as a decision ofattention as well as of perception. Stocking and LaMarca (1990) have appliedthe hypothesis theory of perception to journalism. With intensive interviews,they were able to prove that journalists also start their research with a‘hypothesis’, i.e. an assumption about the truth, valence or meaning of a caseat hand. Stimulated by certain external (sources) or internal (their ownobservations) stimuli, they might assume that, for instance, a company spoiledthe environment with its toxic waste or that a party illegally accepted dona-tions from businesses. As in the academic realm, hypotheses are needed tostart research in a specific direction, to contact sources or to make use of filesand databanks. The question is how many precautions a system provides tosecure a neutral and valid test of these hypotheses.




Starck and Soloski (1977) had journalism students with different attitudeson a controversial event on campus8 cover this event as reporters. Their reportswere then rated by experts according to several professional criteria. Reporterswith strong attitudes for or against the event had produced less balanced, lessaccurate and less objective stories than reporters with a more neutral opinionon the event. Obviously, perceptions as well as their write-up were influencedby the individual’s predispositions (see also Kerrick et al., 1964; Flegel andChaffee, 1971).

The theoretical concept of news-framing can also be applied to journalists’perceptions of issues, events and statements. According to Entman (1993: 52)to frame is to select some aspect of a perceived reality and make them moresalient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particularproblem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation and/or recom-mendation for treatment for the item described. Such more or less stable andhomogeneous news frames played out in the coverage of the German federalelections of 1998. For instance, much of the political coverage in the monthsbefore election day were framed by most news media as indicators for anegative state of the country in almost all political fields for which thegovernment was responsible and for which government rather than the in-dividual also had to find the solution (Kepplinger, 1999).

Thus, the influence of journalists’ predispositions on news decisions iswell proven. Surveys among German journalists also show that a considerableproportion of the profession believes this influence to be legitimate. Forinstance, in a representative survey a majority of the respondents stated thatjournalists have the right to emphasize news which supports their ownviewpoint on a issue (Kepplinger et al., 1991). This might explain why thisform of selective news decision is more widespread among German journaliststhan in other countries. In the previously mentioned survey among newsjournalists in five countries (Germany, United Kingdom, Italy, Sweden, andthe USA), one in two news decisions by German respondents – including theattribution of news value, the selection of headlines, sources and pictures –were made in line with their own predispositions while in the other countriesthis averaged at about one-third (Figure 6, see also Patterson and Donsbach[1996]).

Conclusions

I have emphasized two psychological factors affecting news decisions: thesociopsychological concept of social validation of judgements through socialinteraction and the cognitive-psychological concept of stabilizing existing

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attitudes and cognitions. Both are phenomena which are not singular to

journalism but describe general patterns of human behavior. But in journalism

they are, first, more present and, second, more relevant. They are more present

because journalists, unlike most other professions, constantly have to make

perceptional decisions (truth, relevance, acceptability of facts and issues). They

are more relevant because these decisions form the input of much of the

perception of reality by citizens. In this combination, our picture of the world

outside (Lippmann) is mainly the result of journalists’ perceptions and group-

dynamic processes within the profession.

Can the profession of journalism learn something from other professions?

Judges and scientists are two other professions whose core function can be

described in terms of relevant perceptional decisions. Judges also have to make

factual and evaluative assertions about reality. For instance, in a criminal case,

they have to decide whether a certain fact is true (e.g. a homicide), which

circumstances are relevant for the procedures and how the behavior of the

defendant has to be evaluated and punished according to these circumstances.

In order to ensure the best possible trial, codes of procedures prescribe for

judges what they have to do before making their verdict.

Science, in contrast, is about the acceptance of hypotheses and theories.

According to modern epistemology, scientific statements are limited to empiri-

cally provable assertions. There is no place for value judgements in scientific

discovery. A dispute over the acceptability of a hypothesis is decided by


Figure 6 Influence of subjective beliefs on news decisions: international comparison.Percent of news decisions complying with journalists’ own opinion on issue




empirical evidence, i.e. the result of a validly designed and systematic study.For this purpose the scientific community has developed rules of conduct(methodology) and rules of acceptance (e.g. peer review).

In other words, both these professions work on the basis of systems ofrules which are designed to bring about the best possible approximation totruth. The most important function of these rules, therefore, is to redress theinfluence of subjective predispositions (the prejudices of a judge, the pettheories of a scholar) and group dynamic processes (e.g. personal relationsbetween judges and jurors or attorneys, insider relationships and ‘schoolbuilding’ in science).

It is possible that journalism needs a stronger elaboration of such systemsof rules which are primarily designed to redress the influence of predisposi-tions and group dynamics. Our results so far show that both factors have astrong and related influence on news decisions. As journalists very often havesimilar political and ideological viewpoints, their influence on news decisionsis multiplied.

The implementation of checks and balances to protect against theseinfluences has to start in journalism education. We need more integration ofthe relevant knowledge from journalism research – parts of which have beenpresented in this article – into the journalism curricula. Journalists must beaware of such influences on their own behavior in order to realize these factorswhen these come into play on the job. However, changes in the education andtraining will not be sufficient. It is possible that we will have to re-open thediscussion about a professionalization of journalism which was put to rest inthe 1980s (McLeod and Hawley, 1964; Donsbach, 1981). Professions trade ahigh degree of the quality of their services to society – including rigid systemsof quality control – with a high degree of professional autonomy and usuallysocietal reputation. A process of professionalization would thus not only opendiscussions about the ways in which the quality of news can be secured in theface of subjectivity and group dynamics within the profession, but would alsooffer the possibility of fending off illegitimate influences from outside, forinstance from commercial interests.

Notes

An earlier version of this paper was presented to the Mass Communication Division ofthe International Communication Association (ICA) at the annual conference in SanDiego, California (USA), 23–27 May 2003.

1 This is due to many reasons, among them a long research tradition which has ledto the development of widely accepted quality standards and a methodologicalvigor that is unknown in sociology, political science or communication.

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2 I will not discuss what problems are involved in using terms like ‘reality’ or ‘truereality’. Constructivism, particularly strong among German communication re-searchers, would deny the existence of reality as an entity that can be describedin an inter-subjective way. See, for instance, Krippendorff (1993).

3 Schulz has explicitly addressed this restriction in his news value theory (which istheoretically the most substantial contribution to this field). The only causalexplanation for the existence of news values is journalists’ notions of audienceinterest, see Schulz (1976).

4 The different disciplines have just emerged because division of labor is crucial.This, by the way, is also one of the pragmatic procedures in journalism. Thenecessity to check and double-check information ends at the point where thereporter or editor can rely on other sources with sufficient authority, e.g. newsagencies. Also, the necessity to explain why certain things have happened wouldbecome absurd if, for instance, a reporter has to indicate why a head-of-state’sairplane has landed safely somewhere in the world.

5 These are the results from a comparative cross-national mail survey of newsjournalists in five countries (Germany, Italy, United Kingdom, USA and Sweden).Respondents were randomly selected in each country from daily newspapers,television and radio stations. About 300 journalists in each country participatedin the survey. For more details, see Patterson and Donsbach (1996).

6 The exact question wording in the survey among news journalists in fivecountries read: ‘Journalists work within the limits of a fast-paced and demandingjob. How important is each of the following limitations on the work you do?’ Theitem list included, among nine other items, ‘pressure from senior editors’ and‘pressure from management’.

7 The exact wording read as follows: ‘There are different views of who reallydetermines the agenda of day-to-day news reporting. One view holds that it ismainly the journalists. Another view holds that it is mainly public officials whodetermine the news agenda. As regards your news organization, to what extent doyou think the news agenda is determined by journalists or by public officials?’(Answers were given on a five-point scale. For reasons of simplification, scalepoints 1–3 and 5–7 are collapsed into one category each.)

8 An on-campus speech of a political figure involved in the Watergate scandal.

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Biographical notes

Wolfgang Donsbach is Professor of Communications and Director of the Depart-ment of Communication at Dresden University of Technology, Dresden, Germany.He is the editor of the International Journal of Public Opinion Research and president-elect of the International Communication Association (ICA). His main researchfields are journalism, media content, political communication and publicopinion.Address: Department of Communication, Dresden University of Technology,Germany. [email: [email protected]]




Documents

Psychology of News Decisions: Factors behind Journalists’ Professional Behavior